Ah, Alberto Gonzales

[StefanX]

Ah, Alberto Gonzales
By Larry Beinhart
April 2, 2007

About a year from now pundits and instant historians will point back at the firing of the federal prosecutors and say, 'That's where the impeachment began.'

I'm glad that it began with, or at least around, Alberto.
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Gonzales and his legal team came up with the theory the Geneva Conventions don't apply to opponents in the War on Terror. Neither does domestic law. Indeed, nothing applies. They invented a category of person who has no rights. Even if they're American citizens. Gonzales knew exactly how illegal it was. That's why he wrote a memo that explained, explicitly, that the reason to employ his theory was to "provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
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Gonzales was also the architect of the legal theory that 'permits' the NSA - and now we know, the FBI, and probably other agencies yet to be discovered - to spy on US citizens without warrants.
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But that's not why I'm so happy it's starting with Alberto.

It's that Gonzales starred in my favorite love-to-hate moment, so far, in the strange fog of madness and deception that fell over the country during this administration. It occurred on February 6, 2006, when he was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about that NSA program.

Democrats, then in the minority, asked that Gonzales testify under oath.

An astonishing little charade was played out. Gonzales got to say he was glad to do so. The chairman at the time, Arlen Specter (R-PA) ... stepped in and ruled that it would not be necessary.
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Now, we get to Prosecutorgate.

A few short months ago, Arlen Specter would still have been chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And like all the Bush scandals of the last six years, it would have languished and disappeared into obfuscation, unsworn testimony, secret testimony without transcripts, and no testimony.

After all, Specter enabled the scandal. He was the one who 'slipped' the special clause into the Patriot Act that allowed the administration to avoid the confirmation process for the replacement federal prosecutors. Specter has explained, in that special Republican way, that it was really his chief of staff who did it and that he himself didn't even know about it.
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The trial of breadcrumbs goes right down the hall and into the Oval Office.

Prosecutorgate is not about Alberto Gonzales. It's about impeachment.

Not because Democrats want impeachment, but because testimony under oath, under the penalty of perjury, will reveal that high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed. And that additional ones, like destruction of evidence, were subsequently committed in the process of covering up the original crimes.
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From Prosecutorgate, every road leads to impeachment.

And it's right that it started with Alberto.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-beinhart/ah-alberto-gonzales_b_44809.html

(mods - quoting more than 4 paragraphs because they're short and this page on the huffpost server is opening realllllllllly slowly -- i got this via email!)

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Good read

Thanks for posting.